Every firm has specialty! Ours is social media marketing (SMM). In fact, our CEO wrote the best-selling book on social media marketing, and our staff is made up of experienced experts with real-world experience in helping clients achieve their marketing communications goals.

The Marketing Zen Group is a full-service agency – whatever our clients need online, we can provide. But our focus isn’t on selling services to clients – it’s on partnering with our clients to help them achieve their goals. We offer turn-key social media marketing services to our clients including strategy, implementation, and training. We train our clients in using social media, help them to define their strategy and select tactics, and how to measure their SROI (social return on investment). There are a lot of agencies out there who will offer to help you design and implement a full-fledged SMM campaign – but we’re proud of being recognized as one of the few that actually becomes a strategic partner with our clients.

What is Social Media Marketing?

We’d define social media marketing this way: To increase sales by promoting a product or service via social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and others, using a range of marketing communications tools and techniques.

Let’s take a quick look at traditional marketing vs. social media marketing.

Traditional Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Dominate the Market!

Create a Social Media Community within the Market

Shout Out Loud

Listen, and then Whisper

Me, Me, Me

Us, Us, Us

PUSH the Product or Service

PULL in People with your Message/Story

Advertising

Word of Mouth Social Marketing

Control

Allow

Nurture “Leads”

Nurture Relationships

Many of the tools used in traditional marketing – advertising, public relations, content marketing, contests and promotions – are also used in social media marketing. The difference is that social media marketing requires a change in focus and attitude that has proven very difficult for some agencies to learn. It’s why hiring an agency built from the ground up to maximize your social media results makes sense: we can guide you through the rapidly changing landscape, and help you avoid costly mistakes while you get the results you want.

Why Bother with Social Media Marketing?

Social media gives business owners powerful tools for reaching thousands of prospects and clients at the click of a mouse. However, you need a strong business strategy and knowledge of online marketing before these tools will deliver measurable return on investment.

We build the metrics and measurement analytics in to our SMM campaigns from the beginning – so you’ll know how to measure the results you get before you spend a dollar on social media marketing. Collecting the right data, and analyzing it with a view towards long-term success, is just part of the strong business mind-set we bring to every client project.

To that end, we’ll help you figure out:

What exactly am I trying to accomplish with social media and why?

What are the most pressing challenges that prospective and current customers face, and how can I help them overcome these?

What are the most effective delivery tools for my messages?

How can I build enduring relationships and turn strangers into lifetime customers?

It all comes down to your overall plan. An effective social media strategy is all about the big picture. What needs to be accomplished, and why. Once the strategy is in place, we’ll help you move on to the tactics – the where, when, and how – that will implement your strategy.

Your website is the most critical part of your social media strategy. If it isn’t ready to convert browsers into customers, with well-written, easy-to-navigate, attractive pages that are optimized so the search engines can help potential customers find you, then that should be addressed before you invest heavily in a social media campaign. (Got questions about what makes a website “social media ready”? Talk to one of our web experts today.)

Selecting Your Social Media Targets

Whether you’re active in social media or not, you already have a presence there. Customers, employees, suppliers, vendors, and even competitors are already talking about you on social media sites like Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, YouTube, and Google+.

Does your business need to be on all of these social media platforms? Maybe – maybe not. It depends on the demographics of your audience. One of the things that makes The Marketing Zen Group different from other agencies is that we don’t show up at the first meeting with a pre-packaged plan to sell to a new client. We’ll listen to you first, then and develop recommendations for your company that will help you achieve your specific goals, solve the most pressing problems, and stay within your budget. We don’t believe in one-size fits all social media marketing – and neither should you.

In fact, 49% of web users will make a purchase this month based on recommendations they received through a social media site.

Evaluate your Social Return on Investment (SROI). Evaluate SROI as a tool for measuring a much broader concept of value. SROI incorporates social, environmental, and economic costs and benefits into decision making and helps you readjust your strategy and tactics to meet your goals.

Measuring SROI

Numbers, however, tell only half of the story. There’s also the question of sentiment – what percentage of the comments about your brand are positive instead of negative? Is your social media marketing effort pushing that sentiment needle in a positive direction?

Your SROI – social return on investment – has to go a step further, and connect the results to your bottom line. We’ve been helping companies do that for years, and we’d love the chance to show you how to do it, too.

Analytics will tell you how many visitors came to your website from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They will also reveal how many people are engaging, buying, and more. Using analytics to constantly adapt our strategies, we are able to deliver our clients the best bang for their buck.